Theology, philosophy, and just plain thinking.

A Fairy Tale, Part 1

One of my favorite authors is George Orwell, who, among other things, wrote Animal Farm. This fairy tale is inspired by Animal Farm and is in the same genre. While some things have a one-to-one correspondence to our lives, others might not. The point of this genre is to communicate the big picture in a new, fresh way so that it is easier to look at something we’re used to looking at in one way in another way. So, without further ado:

Once upon a time, there was an air-breathing people who moved to the bottom of the sea to live.

They had a problem: there was no air at the bottom of the sea. Now, this air-breathing people could live a for a few years without air, unlike us, who can only manage a few moments, but, if they had air to breath, they would live forever.

And so this people continued to live on the bottom of the sea without air, gasping out their short, painful lives, and they began to forget that they could breath air, or that they could live forever when they breathed it, or even that air existed. After thousands of years of living at the bottom of the sea, most of them even forgot what air was.

One day a Baby was born who had a bubble of air around His head. He said that He had been sent by His Father, the King of Everything, to tell everyone that they could have air too, if they believed Him and became friends with Him and His Father.

Most people didn’t believe Him. They had stopped even debating whether air existed and didn’t even know what it was anymore, so they didn’t recognize that the bubble around His head was air. Even the people who wanted to be His friends didn’t really understand what air was, but they loved Him anyway and tried to understand.

One day, the people at the bottom of the sea got together and killed the Man with the bubble of air around His head, but He came back to life. His friends started to understand what He had been talking about. He went back up above the sea, but His friends started to have bubbles of air grow around their heads because they believed in Him and were friends with Him and His Father.

They started telling other people, people they knew and people they didn’t know, about Him, His Father and the air around their heads. Many people got excited about what they had to say. Many people who had doubts about what they said were won over because they saw that the people with bubbles around their heads didn’t gasp painfully through life the way they did. Sometimes, when the people with bubbles around their heads got close to people who didn’t, the people who didn’t would bump the bubble and get a whiff of air. Many people decided to believe in the King of Everything and to be His friend and bubbles of air grew around their heads too.

But many people decided that these people with bubbles around their heads were bad. They killed many of them and chased most of the others from place to place. They called them “bubbleheads” and said that the only air they had around their heads was “hot air.” They got mad at the “bubbleheads” for saying that they had bubbles around their heads and that other people didn’t. They said that the “bubbleheads” thought they were better than everyone else.

The King of Everything’s friends started calling themselves Bubbleheads too, and continued to tell everyone about the King of Everything as they were chased from place to place, so that more and more people heard about and became friends with the King of Everything. In time, many, many people became Bubbleheads. Even some kings and emperors became Bubbleheads.